The Salerno Book Of Health

The Salerno Book of Health. Images from History of the School of Salernum by Sir John Harington. 1920.

With Introduction by Dr. Ian Carr.

The earliest Italian medical school opened in Salerno in the ninth century AD, and as the place where the streams of classical, Arab and Jewish medicine flowed together was the predecessor of the medical renaissance. A number of medical texts have survived from the Salerno school on various aspects of medicine. The best known is the Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum, the Salerno Book of Health. The book is filled with practical suggestions for maintaining health, at a time when medicine was largely ineffective in curing sickness. It was translated by Sir John Harington, who is also credited with the invention of that most useful, and comforting of devices, the water closet, the seat of civilization. The Salerno Book of Health is the lineal ancestor of "Wellness".

Dr. Ian Carr, Professor of Pathology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Manitoba